How To Write ZX Spectrum Games – Chapter 2

Keyboard and Joystick Control

Note: This article was originally written by Jonathan Cauldwell and is reproduced here with permission.

One Key at a Time

Providing that you haven’t disabled or otherwise meddled with the Spectrum’s default interrupt mode the ROM will automatically read the keyboard and update several system variables located at memory location 23552 fifty times per second. The simplest way to check for a keypress is to first load address 23560 with a null value, then interrogate this location until it changes, the result being the ASCII value of the key pressed. This is most useful for those “press any key to continue” situations, for choosing items from a menu and for keyboard input such as high score name entry routines. Such a routine might look like this:

Multiple Key-presses

Single key-presses are seldom any use for fast action arcade games however, for this we need to detect more than one simultaneous key-press and this is where things get a little trickier. Instead of reading memory addresses we have to read one of eight ports, each of which corresponds to a row of five keys. Of course, most Spectrum models appear to have far more keys than this so where did they all go? Well actually, they don’t. The original Spectrum keyboard layout consisted of just forty keys, arranged in eight groupings or rows of five. In order to access some of the functions it was necessary to press certain combinations of keys together – for example to delete the combination required was CAPS SHIFT and 0 together. Sinclair added these extra keys when the Spectrum Plus came onto the scene in 1985, and they work by simulating the combinations of key-presses required for the original rubber keyed models.

To discover which keys are being pressed we read the appropriate port number, each key in the row being allocated one of the lower five bits d0-d4 (values 1,2,4,8 and 16) where d0 represents the outside key, d4 the innermost. Curiously, each bit is high where it is not pressed, low where it is – the opposite of what you might expect.

To read a row of five keys we simply load the port number into the bc register pair, then perform the instruction in a,(c). As we only need the lowest value bits we can ignore the bits we dont want either with an and 31 or by rotating the bits out of the accumulator into the carry flag using five rra:call c,(address) instructions.

Joysticks

Sinclair joystick ports 1 and 2 were simply mapped to each of the rows of number keys and you can easily prove this by going into the BASIC editor and using the joystick to type numbers. Port 1 (Interface 2) was mapped to the keys 6,7,8,9 and 0, Port 2 (Interface 1) to keys 1,2,3,4 and 5. To detect joystick input we simply read the port in the same way as reading the keyboard. Sinclair joysticks use ports 63486 (Interface 1/port 2), and 61438 (Interface 2/port 1), bits d0-d4 will give a 0 for pressed, 1 for not pressed.

The popular Kempston joystick format is not mapped to the keyboard and can be read by using port 31 instead. This means we can use a simple in a,(31). Again, bit values d0-d4 are used although this time the bit settings are as you might expect, with a bit set high if the joystick is being applied in a particular direction. The resulting bit values will be 1 for pressed, 0 for not pressed.

A Simple Game

We can now go one step further and, putting into practice what we have already covered, write the main control section for a basic game. This will form the basis of a simple Centipede variant we will be developing over the next few chapters. We haven’t covered everything needed for such a game yet but we can make a start with a small control loop which allows the player to manipulate a small gun base around the screen. Be warned, this program has no exit to BASIC so make sure you’ve saved a copy of your source code before running it.

Fast, isn’t it? In fact, we’ve slowed the loop down with a halt instruction but it still runs at a speedy 50 frames per second, which is probably a little too fast. Don’t worry, as we add more features to the code it will begin to slow down. If you are feeling confident you might like to try adapting the above program to work with a Kempston joystick. It isn’t difficult, and merely requires changing port 63486 to port 31, and replacing the four subsequent call nc,(address) to call c,(address) (The bits are reversed, remember?)

Redefineable keys are a little more tricky. As you are probably aware, the original Spectrum keyboard was divided into 8 rows of 5 keys each, and by reading the port associated with a particular row of keys, then testing bits d0-d4 we can tell if a particular key is being pressed. If you were to replace ld bc,31 in the code snippet above with ld bc,49150 you could test for the row of keys H to Enter – though that doesn’t make for a convenient redefine keys routine. Thankfully, there is another way of going about it.

We can establish the port required for each row of keys using the formula in the Spectrum manual. Where n is the row number 0-7 the port address will be 254+256*(255-2^n). There’s a ROM routine at address 654 which does a lot of the hard work for us by returning the number of the key pressed in the e register, in the range 0-39. 0-7 correspond to the innermost key of each row in turn (that’s B, H, Y, 6, 5, T, G and V), 8-15 to the next key along in each row up to 39 for the outermost key on the last row – CAPS SHIFT. The shift key status, just for the record, is also returned in d. If no key is pressed then e returns 255.

The ROM routine can only return a single key number which is no good for detecting more than one keypress at a time. To determine whether or not a specific key is being pressed at any time we need to convert the number back into a port and bit, then read that port and check the individual bit for ourselves. There’s a very handy routine I use for the job, and it’s the only routine in my games which I didn’t write myself. Credit for that must go to Stephen Jones, a programmer who used to write excellent articles for the Spectrum Discovery Club many years ago. To use his routine, load the accumulator with the number of the key you wish to test, call ktest, then check the carry flag. If it’s set the key is not being pressed, if there’s no carry then the key is being pressed. If that’s too confusing and seems like the wrong way round, put a ccf instruction just before the ret.